Balko on the Bennie Starks Case

Radley Balko of the Huffington Post published a nice comprehensive piece on his blog The Agitator concerning the defamation suit filed by two Chicago dentists against Michael Bowers. Balko opens his story by saying “Michael Bowers has been one of the heroes to shed light on the bite mark matching fraud. He has personally exposed a number of quacks, and contributed to the National Academy of Sciences report that found no scientific basis for the idea that bite marks on human skin can be definitively matched to one person, to the exclusion of everyone else.”

The two forensic dentists suing Bowers testified that the bitemark found on the shoulder of the victim to be a “definite match” in the wrongful conviction of Bennie Starks. DNA has since been found from semen and from the bitemark that did not implicate Bennie Starks. Starks has been released from prison after serving many years and is awaiting the decision from the prosecutor whether to be re-tried. What is most amazing is that despite the DNA found not to belong to Starks and the bitemark analysis being severely criticized by two excellent odontologists, the two expert odontologists for the prosecution stand by their opinion that Starks bit the women. The frivolity of the suit is further exposed when the damages include loss of income from dental patients to their private practices.

Balko finishes his piece exposing how the ABFO dental expert Dr. Lowell Levine who was interviewed in the CNN story also made a mistake in mis-identifying an individual via bite marks. But like the two Chicago dentists, Dr. Levine remains defiant that a mistake was made despite DNA implicating a man other than that identified by Levine to be the biter.